From: Страхиња Радић (vilinkamen@mail.ru)
Date: Mon Jun 13 2005 - 12:08:54 CDT
I apologize for late response, as I'm in a middle of an exam season.
Still, I managed to find some time to answer to Mr. Everson.
Дана 2005.06.03 13:38, Michael Everson је написао:
> >It seems to me that Croatian was favored in place of Old Slavic for
> >Glagolitic.
>
> Croatian what? Old Slavic what? Glagolitic what? Names? Characters?
Croatian lack of ``yeriy''. Croatian names of characters. Lack of Old
Slavic names for some characters. Lack of Old Slavic presence of ``yeriy''.
> Unicode's Glagolitic character set is intended to
> be a superset of Glagolitic characters used in
> different parts of the Slavic-speaking world.
And it is really a subset, lacking ``yeriy''.
> >Ok, so you could add Croatian-specific chars to
> >the foundation of Old Slavic ones and everybody
> >would be happy. But that didn't happen. Instead,
> >the Old Slavic version of Glagolitic was
> >crippled.
>
> I can't see how. How?
By the lack of ``yeriy''.
> So? And it's something else in Old Bulgarian, probably.
[...]
> What's your point? The character needed to have a
> name. Apparently it is not used in the
> Russian-speaking area, so PALOCHKA would have
> been inappropriate. Apparently, its name is
> SHTAPITCH (however you like to spell it).
My point is, the names *should* all be in Old Slavic, or, if that is
not possible, in English, although I know that the names cannot be changed now.
About ``SHTAPITCH'': you said that ``SHTAPITCH'' is Croatian word,
while it is both Serbian and Croatian (and maybe also used in some other Slavic
language).
> >I know the policies of the Unicode Consortium,
> >and that nothing can be changed, renamed or
> >deleted, however, I think ``yeriy'' can and
> >should
> >be *added*, correcting the mistake.
>
> What mistake?
The lack of ``yeriy''.
> >And there is a reason why the Russian
> >typewriters all have ``yeriy'' as a separate key.
>
> That is Cyrillic. Glagolitic is not a font variant of Cyrillic.
Maybe it is not a font variant of *modern* Cyrillic, but it certainly
is related to Old Cyrillic. Each and every Glagolitic letter has its own
version in Old Cyrillic, and the exact same name.
> A precomposed double-glyph was not encoded for
> Glagolitic because it could not be shown that it
> was necessary; indeed it would lead to multiple
> spellings, which is not a good thing..
What multiple spellings? There is no single use of standalone YERU+IZHE
in Glagolitic and in Old Cyrillic other than YERIY. Moreover, the software that
has ligature handling capabilities should replace every occurence of YERU+IZHE
with YERIY, in the similar way it replaces F+I with FI.
>[...] To put it
> another way, you can represent a Glagolitic word
> with that sound by using a sequence of the
> Glagolitic characters YERU and INITIAL IZHE.
> Can't you?
Yes, I can, but one can also represent ``W'' with ``VV'' or ``R'' with
``12'' (font-dependant), can't he? But this isn't standard practice.
> >Also, in my opinion, it would be better if the
> >names were in (more general) Old Slavic or
> >English, instead in modern Serbian or Croatian.
>
> The names we used and their transliterations are
> documented in the proposal document. I don't know
> what you mean by "English". AZU means "I";
I meant that it would be better if the names of the Glagolitic
characters were completely in one language, be it Old Slavic or English.
BTW, Valerii Alekseevich Chudinov (Валерий Алексеевич Чудинов) in his
book ``The riddles of Slavic written language'' (``Загадки славянской
письменности'') connects AZU with ``As'', the name of an Old Slavic pagan
deity.
> [...] Nor does it imply that
> we like Serbs better than Bulgarians or Russians
> or any such thing.
But the lack of ``yeriy'' and the Croatian naming of some characters
implies that Croatian version of Glagolitic was taken as main model with this
accepted version of the standard, instead of the Bulgarian version (``yeriy''
included) with Old Slavic names, which in my opinion is closer to original
version. The fact that the round version of characters is used in PDFs on
unicode.org only hides this.
> Those are pseudo-characters which were only
> encoded in Unicode because of votes on the
> negative ballot on the first version of ISO/IEC
> 10646. They were wanted "for one-to-one
> transliteration" of Serbian and Croatian. I doubt
> anyone uses them.
I also doubt that anyone uses them. And I bet *every* professional
slavist would use and *prefer* ``yeriy'' to ``yeru''+``izhe'' when writing
texts in Glagolitic.
Best regards,
Strahinya
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